The Intel Core i9-9980XE CPU Review: Refresh Until it Hertz
by Ian Cutress on November 13, 2018 9:00 AM ESTHEDT Performance: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
Corona sees improvement in line with the frequency gain, however the higher core count AMD parts win out here.
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
Similarly with Blender as to Corona: the new Intel Core i9-9980XE performs better than the previous generation 7980XE, but sits behind the higher core count AMD parts.
LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths
As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs. *It has been mentioned that LuxMark, since the Spectre/Meltdown patches, is not a great representation of the LuxRender engine. We still use the test as a good example of different code path projections.
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.
Our test here seems to put processors into buckets of performance. In this case, the Core i9-9980XE goes up a bucket.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
POV-Ray is as expected: a performance improvement, but behind the higher core count AMD parts.
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MisterAnon - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
PNC is not right at all, he's completely wrong. Unless your job requires you to walk around and type at the same time using a laptop is a net loss of producitivity for zero gain. At a professional workplace anyone who thinks that way would definitely be fired. If you're going to be in the same room for 8 hours a day doing real work, it makes sense to have a desktop with dual monitors. You will be faster, more efficient, more productive, and more comfortable. Powerful desktops are more useful today than ever before due to the complexity of modern demands.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
What is your source for gamers being the primary consumers of HDET?imaheadcase - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Well of course for programming its ok. That is like saying you moved from a desktop to a phone for typing. It requires nothing to type hardly for power. lol That pretty much as always been the case.bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I think you are implying programming is not a CPU intensive task? Certainly it can be low intensity for small projects, but trust me it can also use as much CPU as you can possibly throw at it. When you have a project that requires compiling thousands or tens of thousands of files to build it ... the workload scales fairly linearly with the number of cores, up to some fuzzy limit mostly set by memory bandwidth.twtech - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
I also work in software development (games), and my experience has been completely the opposite. I've actually only known one programmer who preferred to work on a laptop - he bought a really high-end Clevo DTR and brought it in to work.I do have a laptop at my desk - I brought in a Surface Book 2 - but I mostly just use it for taking notes. I don't code on it.
Unless you're going to be moving around all the time, I don't know why you'd prefer to look at one small screen and type on a sub-par laptop keyboard if there's the choice of something better readily available. And two 27" screens is pretty much the minimum baseline - I have 3x 30" here at home.
:And then of course there's the CPU - if you're working on a really small codebase, it might not matter. But if it's a big codebase, with C++, you want to have a lot of cores to be able to distribute the compiling load. That's why I'm really interested in the forthcoming W3175x - high clocks plus 28 cores on a monolithic chip sounds like a winning combination for code compiling. High end for a laptop is what, 6 cores now?
Laibalion - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
What utter nonsense. I'be been working on large and complex c++ codebases (2M+ LOC for a single product) for over a decade, and compute power is an absolute necessity to work efficiently. Compile times such beast scales linearly (if done properly), so no one wants a shit mobile cpu for their workstation.HStewart - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Mobile has been this way for decade - I got a new job working at home and everyone is on laptops - todays laptop are as powerful as most desks - work has quad core notebook and this is my 2nd notebook and first one was from nine years ago. Desktops were not used in my previous job. Notebook mean you can be mobile - for me that is when I go to home office which is not often - but also bring notebook to meeting and such.I am development C++ and .net primary.
Desktop are literary dinosaurs now becoming part of history.
bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
You are not working on big enough projects. For your projects, a laptop may be sufficient; but for larger projects, there is certainly a wide chasm of difference between the capabilities of a laptop and those of a workstation class developer system.MisterAnon - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
Today's laptops are not as powerful as desktops. They use slow mobile processors, and overheat easily due to thermals. If you're working from home you're still sitting in a chair all day, meaning you don't need a laptop. If your company fired you and hired someone who uses a desktop with dual monitors, they would get significantly more work done for them per dollar.Atari2600 - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I wouldn't call them very "professional" when they are sacrificing 50+% productivity for mobility.Anyone serious about work in a serious work environment* has a workstation/desktop and at least 2 of UHD/4k monitors. Anything else is just kidding yourself thinking you are productive.